The challenge some advertisers face is they simply can’t make the numbers work for their AdWords campaign. They have to spend more money on click charges and other related costs, than they make from a lead or sale. There simply isn’t enough profit in the sale of their product or service to off-set the costs associated with developing and managing an AdWords account.

This sometimes happens slowly, over time. Advertisers that began using AdWords several years ago, when there were far fewer advertisers, much cheaper clicks and AdWords was a lot simpler. These advertisers are now finding it difficult to compete. Years ago, you may have been able to sell a $20 item to a one-time buyer, but not today.

Having a PPC campaign means you have now entered the world of “online direct marketing”. And while PPC is the fastest and most flexible form of direct-response marketing ever invented, it still conforms too many of the marketing industry’s statistical averages that have proven out over the last 100 years.

Unless you have unusual circumstances, you should expect a “conversion rate” of around 1-4%. That means about 2% of the visitors to your site from a PPC campaign will take “the desired action”. The desired action can be any one of a number of things, such as; filling out your contact form, signing up for your newsletter, downloading a special report, calling you on the phone or perhaps buying a relatively low-cost item. These are actions a visitor from a search engine will realistically take within 30 – 90 days. I use 30 – 90 days because that is how long AdWords tracks a visitor after they click on your ad. But in many cases, the desired action only produces a lead, not a sale. Once you have the lead, you then need to convert it to a sale. Conversion rates from a lead to a sale are typically 20-50%.

I want to emphasize that there can be a wide variation in what is considered a conversion and not all desired actions can be recorded using Google AdWords conversion tracking. However, if you do register actions as conversions in AdWords, remember that conversions can be registered in AdWords up to thirty days from the date of the last clicked AdWords ad.

Another challenge that confronts novice PPC advertisers is when the most desired action is a phone call. That’s because a phone call cannot be easily tracked and reported in AdWords. This presents at least two problems. 1) You lose the ability to track the action back to a search query, keyword or ad, and 2) It becomes more difficult to see tangible improvement in the near-term. If you will be judging the performance of your AdWords account based on the number of phone calls, you need to have a reliable benchmark and plan on at least a 2-3 month test to gather statistically significant data on which to evaluate the new campaign. For additional information, see my article titled Telephone conversions.

I usually suggest using conversion tracking for actions a visitor from a search engine would realistically take within 30 days of visiting your website from an AdWords ad. That’s because, as a campaign manager, I want to get as much data as possible that indicates you have made a connection with a prospect. Therefore, I would typically want to track whether a visitor performed an action such as downloading a white paper or signing up for a newsletter, rather than if they purchased a $500 item. I suggest this because I will have a lot more data to work with.

Now back to the example of a 2% conversion rate. If your average CPC (Cost-Per-Click) is $1.00, you are paying about $50 for a conversion. If the initial conversion only produces a lead, then you still need to convert the lead to a sale, which will increas you cost per sale even further. Are those numbers realistic for your business? Can you live with the results? Only you can determine that. My job is to get the average CPC down as low as I can, while still getting qualified visitors. I do that by having lots of relevant keyword phrases with lower CPCs, having compelling, yet qualifying ad copy and using techniques to filter out unwanted impressions and clicks. There is a lot more to it, but these are the basics. If you want to get an idea of what the average CPC might be for some of your most popular keywords, go to SpyFu.com.

There are other factors to consider. Perhaps the most significant being the life-time value of a customer. Once you have acquired a customer, what is the likelihood of them buying from you again? How extensive is your offering? Really successful internet marketers can afford to lose money on the first sale because they have an extensive “back-end”. Meaning they have many other, more profitable products or services they can sell, once they have acquired the customer. If you don’t, then you can’t effectively compete with these advertisers.

Some industries are particularly vulnerable to this situation. It is particularly challenging in markets where the main keywords are relatively short, only 1-2 words, and the competition is fierce. Businesses such as computer repair, software development, locksmith and auto repair. It becomes particularly difficult if you are targeting a nation-wide audience because there is a lot of competition and you often compete with “lead brokers”. These are very skilled internet marketers that have fine-tuned their campaigns to operate on very thin margins.

Here is another challenge that occurs when your most popular keywords are short. It’s very difficult to maintain good quality scores, which means you are forced to bid higher. I consider anything “7/10” or above to be good. The reason is that these keywords tend to be quite broad, meaning lots of advertisers are bidding on them, and the overwhelming element of the quality score is “how the keyword performs across the entire Google system”. Unfortunately, this is something we have no control over. Although, there are tactics we can use that could help minimize this condition.

In summary, some advertisers face a unique set of challenges when it comes to making AdWords a successful channel, and quite often these advertisers tend to be smaller businesses with limited budgets and lack the experience and commitment necessary to perform an adequate market test. All the more reason to engage the services of a professional. If you only try making it work yourself and fail, you may never know if AdWords can actually work for you.

Since I’ve been providing professional AdWords consulting, which has been since 2004, I’ve worked with advertisers that have a wide range of experience. AdWords has evolved considerably since it was first introduced back in October of 2000. In this time, perhaps the most significant change has been the introduction of the quality score. Actually, there are several quality scores related to your account, but the only one you can actually see is the one associated with your keywords. Nevertheless, they are all interrelated.

The quality score is so significant that an update to the quality score algorithm can literally put a multi-million dollar businesses out-of-business overnight! If you want to master AdWords, you must pay attention to and gain an appreciation for quality scores. Hal Varian, Google’s Chief Economist, has an excellent YouTube video that puts quality score in perspective.

My goal in writing this post is not to try and teach you the finer details of the quality score, but to give you an appreciation for some of its ramifications when you consider making changes to your AdWords account or your website. Although I do offer another post where I go into more depth on the AdWords quality score. My objective is to highlight these scenarios which I often see.

A history of poor quality score that needs to be improved

A history of good quality scores, but poor campaign performance

Most of my prospects and clients come to me because they believe their AdWords account can be improved, but they just don’t know what to or where to start, much less what to expect if they do make a change.

Over the years, I have gained a pretty good understanding of how AdWords works and what Google refers to as their best practices. Therefore, when I work with clients, I will be implementing these best practices in a way that best fits the goals of the client. Some clients want short-term improvements either because they don’t have the time, patience, budget or long-term commitment, and others want to get right with the program and do whatever it takes to get where they want to be, as quickly as possible. They see it as an investment in their business and understand that there could be some short-term setbacks if we are to achieve long-term gains. This is the essence of what this post is all about.

One of the biggest factors in being successful with AdWords, is to understand the importance Google places on relevance. I talk about relevance in more detail in my article titled A chain of success. The other factor is history or longevity. How long has a particular element of your account history been around and how has it performed over time? This is where I make the connection between Google and an elephant, because an elephant never forgets and neither does Google!

In literally the blink of an eye, Google calculates the instantaneous quality score every time your ad is displayed. And some of those 100+ elements that go into the quality score calculation are things like; how long has your domain been in existence, how long has your AdWords account been in existence, how long has this campaign, ad group, ad copy, keyword been in existence and how have they performed?

Google likes longevity and rewards you for it. On the other hand, if you have a history of poor quality scores, it is like a whole you eventually must crawl out of. You don’t get any do-overs! Creating a new ad group, campaign, even a new account will not release you from the clutches of Google’s memory banks. Think of quality score like your grade point average. That poor grade never goes away, it can only be reduced in significance by lots of better grades.

Now I’ll try and tie all of this together. If you have an AdWords account with several months or even years of relatively poor quality score history, you are at a distinct disadvantage over another advertiser with a good history. On the other hand, if you have a solid history of good quality scores and we need to redesign your account, there could be short-term (weeks) setbacks in terms of quality scores and CPCs, while the new campaign builds its own history. If you change the domain name or make significant changes to your website, even if they conform better to Google’s best practices, it will take time to reap the benefits. The Google bot that gathers data for the quality score may not come around for several weeks or even months, and there is no way you (or me) can make that happen any faster.

In summary, I want you to be aware of just how important relevance and history play in the process of getting your AdWords account to perform to its full potential and what you can expect when we begin making changes to your account.

When it comes to using Google search, meaning Google.com and their search partners, including search engines like AOL.com and ASK.com, Google is focused on one thing, creating the best experience possible so users will prefer their search engine over all others. To accomplish this, they build their algorithms to reward advertisers for one thing, relevance. How relevant is your keyword, ad copy, landing page and website to what the user is searching for? I discuss this in more detail in my article titled A chain of success.

When advertisers play by Google’s rules, meaning they build their AdWords campaigns and websites according to Google AdWords best practices, they are rewarded with things like; higher ad ranking, lower CPCs and more ad exposure. Google calls this Impression Share.

But what if there were relatively few searches for what you offer or if the best keyword for you (personal injury attorney) is extremely expensive? You might feel that if users saw your ad, even when searching for something else, there is a good chance they will be interested? Then what you are trying to do is known as interruption marketing or branding, which is quite different from direct-response search engine advertising, which by the way is the generic definition of Google AdWords search.

If that is the case, then what you are trying to accomplish runs completely counter to how Google search (organic or paid) is designed to work and you have some real challenges ahead of you. Just as an aside, interruption marketing is precisely what the Google display network is all about, but that’s a topic for another day. See my post titled Display network advertising.

Let me provide a quick example. You sell car insurance. This is a fiercely competitive market and in order to maintain a Cost-Per-Click you can afford, you want to advertise for related searches that are less costly, but still relevant to car insurance buyers. You know users are searching for a “Chevy Tahoe”, but you hope that when they see your ad for “Great deals on car insurance”, they will click on your ad, go to your website and request a quote for auto insurance. We call that a conversion.

The first step in this process is to create campaigns and optimize them according to Google’s best practices for the terms that you feel are most relevant to what you offer. In the example above, this would be for “car insurance”. This means creating campaigns and fine-tuning them to achieve a sustainable CPA (Cost-Per-Acquisition) that you want. How you do this is basically how you master AdWords. When you do this, you will be taking the competition head-on. Not a trivial task for sure. This is basically what I do for clients every day.

Another quick sidebar, whether we are talking about the traditional way of building AdWords search campaigns or the non-traditional way I’ll be explaining, there is one important common thread. You must have accurate and reliable conversion tracking. Your ability to optimize your campaign will be directly related to how well you link a conversion back to the things you can control; keywords, matching options, ad copy, landing pages and website content. If you can’t do that, you are leaving a lot to chance. You are essentially flying blind and that’s not good.

In order to appreciate what I’m about to explain, you need to understand how Google has evolved over the past few years, since they went public and became accountable to Wall Street. Once they became a public company, they were expected to continually increase revenue and profits. By the way, Google AdWords accounts for 95% of Google’s profits. Google needed a way to drive up revenue, meaning click charges, in an equitable way. The method they used was to create a Quality Score. I call it Google’s profit dial because a relatively minor adjustment to the quality score algorithm can generate huge additional profits for Google.

Quality score is the part of Google’s algorithm that determines if your ad gets shown, when, where and how much a click costs you. The quality score has over 100 elements to it and Google is intentionally vague about how it works. It’s their secret sauce.

There simply isn’t any way around it. When it comes to Google search, you are bound by Google’s rules. If you are attempting to trick Google or the user, the best you can hope for is to simply stay in the game and get your ad shown as often as possible to qualified prospects who will be intrigued enough to click on your ad and convert. Staying in the game requires that you achieve a minimum level of performance for quality score, at least a score of 1. Anything higher is even better. A score of 0 and your ad does not see the light of day.

The degree to which you are able to obtain a higher quality score will determine how much impression share you receive and what your minimum bid must be. But there is a delicate balancing act required. You must maintain enough relevance in your ad copy and landing page to achieve minimum levels of quality, while at the same time being clear about what you offer. Relevance will determine how often your ad is displayed. The amount of competition will determine the keyword’s first page bid price and how truthful you are in the ad copy will have a major impact on your conversion rate.

The SNIM plan

Strategy – Display ads to users searching for related products or services, but not what you actually offer. Interrupt their search process with a related offer they can’t refuse. However, your ad must be relevant to what they are searching for.

Objective – Get as much impression share as you can, at the lowest CPC possible, but make sure the user is qualified. Quality score needs to be at least 3 and CTR is not critically important. However, a higher QS and CTR will produce better results.

Tactics

With just a few exceptions, the process for building campaigns for Search Network Interruption Marketing (SNIM) will be pretty much the same as it is for the search terms you want to compete head-on for. Meaning the search terms you want to get as close to 100% impression share, the highest quality scores and the best CTRs.

For the purpose of SNIM, the more keywords you have, the more exposure you get, and this is a game of exposure, but only at the right price.

Conversion tracking or some other similar tool that manages the campaign to CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) targets will significantly reduce the level of on-going effort.

Build and test ad groups to achieve the objectives mentioned above. If you plan to test Conversion Optimizer, have at least 30 days of history with as many conversions as possible. The more, the better.

Search terms – Determine what search terms you want your ad to display for. This requires a good understanding of the business, the business model, what is being offered, what makes a good or bad prospect and more. If the person setting up the campaign does not have a good understanding of this, it undermines the entire strategy.

Keywords – Use keywords and matching options that will display your ad for the desired search terms. Use negative keywords to filter poor quality visitors. Longer-tail keywords will produce less competition and higher quality scores, but be aware of what I call The keyword conundrum. Be careful of broad-matched keywords because they will trigger for “synonyms or related searches”. The more broad-matched keywords you can use, the more exposure you will get. Remember, the objective is broad exposure so the more keywords you have, the better.

Ad copy – Ad copy needs to first be relevant to the keyword and secondly be truthful about what the visitor will see when they click through. Use the keyword in the ad copy, preferably the headline and the display URL. Create ads that tell the visitor what they will find when they click on the ad. Be honest. The click does little good if the visitor doesn’t convert. This is a case where all you want is a CTR good enough to keep your ad showing at a good impression share.

Ad groups – Construct ad groups with common themes that link search terms to keywords, keywords to ad copy and ad copy to your custom landing page. Create ad groups around core words or phrases of similar value to the business. This is important because even though conversion optimizer is implemented at the campaign level, you set your CPA at the ad group level.

Campaigns – Create campaigns around groups containing keywords of similar value to your business. Use AdWords conversion tracking to optimize performance to the desired CPA targets. Campaigns with higher value traffic are worth more and you can afford to pay more for a conversion.

Landing page – use the keyword in the URL, h1 tag, headline and throughout the page.

Monitor the search queries to insure the traffic is relevant. Use negative keywords to filter poor quality traffic.

Things you need to know:

The devil is in the details. When this strategy is implemented properly it is a tedious and time-consuming process. There is a lot about what I have described that requires advanced knowledge of Google AdWords. This is not an advised course of action for the novice AdWords advertiser.

If you have an existing account that consists of many campaigns, ad groups and keywords, and is generating business, you need to be extremely careful not to do anything that can’t be easily undone or you could jeopardize the business.

If you have an existing account that is producing business and you don’t want to go through the time and expense of building and fine-tuning new campaigns, I suggest you simply focus on your search term reports and use negative keywords to filter the obviously poor quality traffic. This is far less costly to do and carries a lot less risk.

There are actually many different quality scores associated with your account. However, the only one you can see is associated with an individual keyword. If you have a preponderance of low quality scores, they will have an effect on the campaign where you are striving for higher marks. See my article titled The elephant in Google.

The AdWords Conversion Optimizer is a great tool when used properly. It uses historical conversion data to manipulate bid prices in real-time. However, when the historical data within the campaign indicates very little, if any correlation between the search query and a conversion, it makes it more difficult for CO to “learn” what works and what doesn’t. There is no guarantee CO will produce a better results than what you achieve by bidding manually.

In conclusion, I’d like to recognize that while this practice of SNIM runs counter to the fundamental intent of search advertising and Google AdWords, it is a viable advertising strategy and has produced enormous profits for advertisers who have done it successfully. But it is not to be entered into lightly. It will be a constant up-hill battle and you will remain at the mercy of Google and their ever-changing algorithms. Most noticeably, the quality score.

Let me begin with the fundamental premise that creating any successful advertising campaign, whether it be AdWords or a magazine ad, requires testing and constant fine-tuning. No one ever gets it exactly right the first time.

Whether it be a client’s campaign or one I’m developing for them, the first implementation of an ad group provides valuable information about the market niche you are trying to penetrate. Once you reach the point where you have statistically significant data, you can develop a plan for taking it to the next level.

When the first batch of data becomes available, which could take three days or three months to gather, depending on the number of clicks you receive, you have an idea about the amount of traffic (impressions & clicks) for an individual keyword and the all-important Google AdWords quality score.

If you find yourself in a situation where you have a keyword that:

correctly describes your product or service

cannot be further specified by attaching adjectives that make it more precise without receiving the dreaded status of “Low search volume”

and still have a very low (2-4) quality score

you have a real challenge with limited options.

Most advertisers who find themselves in this predicament want to improve the quality score because:

their ad is not displaying at all (quality score of 0-1) or

their ad is receiving reduced impressions (quality score of 3-6) or

is resulting in an exorbitant CPC (quality score of 2-4).

Chances are, you find yourself in this position because Google has determined that very few, if any advertisers are able to produce a consistently good user experience for that keyword. By this I mean that the metrics Google uses to rate user experiences (CTR, bounce rate, number of pages visited, time on your website, etc.) are relatively low. And in most cases, the reason they are low is because the keyword phrase is very broad. Meaning it is used by a wide range of user interests and therefore it appeals to no one.

When this happens, the reason Google provides is that the quality score you are given for that keyword is most heavily influenced by “how well that keyword has performed throughout the Google system”. This condition can account for as much as 60% of the quality score you receive! It is the largest single component.

In this situation, there are only a few things you can do, with none of them being all that easy or inexpensive. Plus, there will be no guarantee they will make a significant impact, at least in the short-term.

If you do decide to take action, here are the steps I recommend:

Determine which keywords have sufficient search volume to warrant their own ad group.

Create separate ad groups for each one of those keywords and perform additional research to insure you have a full complement of negative keywords. This will ultimately help improve your CTR.

Insure a high degree of relevance between the keyword and the ad copy headline.

Once the new ad groups and landing pages are in place, bid to rank in the number two position.

Here is why you want your ads to appear in the “top” positions, meaning they appear over the organic search results. The CTR of a keyword when it appears in the top position can be many times more than when it appears in the right-hand column or what google calls the “other” position. To see what I mean, run a “Segment” report and chose “Top vs. Other”. You might be surprised.

The single biggest component of keyword quality score is CTR, and in this case, where your performance is being overwhelmingly influenced by “how well that keyword has performed throughout the Google system”, you must demonstrate significantly better CTR performance than the other advertisers. I believe that metric is somewhere in the range of 5% CTR or better.

If you are reading this article you have either made the decision to significantly restructure your AdWords account or you are seriously considering it.

Chances are, you are doing this because your account suffers from what I call the broad match effect. The purpose of this article is to prepare you for the journey we will be on as we transition from your current account structure to the new one.

Making any change to your AdWords account involves some degree of risk. AdWords is an extremely complex and dynamic system. If you allow me to restructure your account, there will be certain risks, but the risk is minimized because we know:

what the problem is,

what to do about it,

what the result will be and

what to expect during the transition.

I want to elaborate on this because there will be short-term setbacks and long-term ramifications. You may see some alarming performance data during the transition. Some of this performance data is real and represents actual short-term and long-term higher costs and some of it is not as real, just misleading.

The real part comes two factors; higher CPC associated with more restrictive keyword matching options and from the fact that we will be reestablishing quality scores for keywords and ad copy. Yes, ad copy has a quality score, you just can’t see it like you can for keywords, but it is real and it does have an impact on performance. Finding the balance of ad quality and optimal ad CTR is tricky business and can only be accomplished through testing. In addition, I recommend giving your Max CPC bids a boost in the early going to establish a higher CTR. As you know, the biggest component of keyword quality score is CTR.

Here is a graphic I created to illustrate how keyword matching options effect your CPC, exposure and quality of visitors.

This is a an alarming reality for some advertisers and you should be prepared to spend 50-500% more CPC when you make this Major Chance to your campaign structure!

The part which is not so obvious is your cost per conversion. Because conversion tracking uses a 30-day cookie, cost/conv data for any given keyword on any given day will change based on newly registered conversions. That’s because conversions and transactions get attributed to the date of the click (on your ad), not the date the conversion occurred.

Here is something for you to think about. If you want to know the effect a change you make today has on cost/conv, you need to wait at least sixty days and then look back thirty days. Otherwise you will be dealing with incomplete and misleading data. You need to resist evaluating the new campaign based on short-term data. Also keep in mind that the number of impressions and clicks can vary considerably from day-to-day, week-to-week and month-to-month. You must be willing to have the necessary confidence, commitment and patience or you should not be doing this.

Depending on your market, conversion tracking data can increase many fold over the life of the cookie, as visitors return to your site (from non-AdWords links) and convert. I make the distinction, “from non-AdWords links”, such as a bookmark, organic listing or website referrals, because AdWords attributes the conversion to the last-clicked ad, keyword and search term, even if the keyword or ad is paused.

I make the point about paused keywords because you will continue to register conversions in your account from keywords in your old campaigns, which may be paused, and you probably won’t be looking at those keywords when we launch the new campaign(s).

The broad-match wild card effect – With all the down-side of using broad-matched keywords, there is one positive aspect worth mentioning, and it can be significant.

The fact is that some search queries can only trigger ads using broad-matched keywords. Unless you have spent considerable time pouring through server logs and search term reports, you probably don’t realize just how many possible unique search queries there are for your broad-matched keywords. It’s essentially unlimited. Some of them are great and some are dogs. The dogs are why you have been racking up all those relatively poor quality impressions and clicks. But notice just how many of those strange ones produced conversions! Chances are that those strange search terms will not trigger your ad with anything other than a broad-matched keyword. If you tried to target that same search query with a more targeted keyword match type, you would almost certainly be given a status of Low search volume.

Here is something else to consider. When you use broad-matched keywords, you become eligible for a very large number of ad auctions. At the time of the ad auction, only a fraction of those eligible, actually get displayed. There are so many dynamic factors at play, that it becomes unpredictable, especially when you have an unusual search query. I call this the broad-match wildcard effect. While you might be very happy that your ad was displayed for a particular search query, it will be impossible to insure that it will be displayed the next time that search query is performed.

While we will try to create keywords and matching options that display your ad for as many relevant search queries as possible, there is only so much we can do. We don’t have complete control over the AdWords system and it isn’t 100% predictable. Therefore, if we use more restrictive keyword match types, you must be willing to accept the fact that we will not be able to display your ad for every conceivable search query. If your logs indicate that you have received a significant number of conversions from search queries that we cannot reliably link to a keyword in the new design, we should not implement a completely new design. A partial redesign, focusing on a segment of the account or campaign may be in order.

The importance of fine-tuning – Most advertisers can’t appreciate the importance of or the amount of time required to fine-tune a campaign once it’s been launched. No one ever get’s everything right when the campaign is first launched.

When the initial campaign is launched, default bid prices are used, which amount to little more than a guess as to what the bid price should be in order to receive the desired ad ranking for each keyword. It’s simply not practical to research bid prices for a large number of keywords prior to launch. In the beginning it will be necessary for me to monitor and make adjustments at least once a day and then it tails off over time. The amount of time this requires depends on the number of keywords, ad groups and campaigns in your account.

Each keyword is unique and is actually a “market” unto itself. Therefore, until the keyword is actually searched on and your ads receive “clicks”, you can’t be sure where your ad will appear in the ranking or how much you need to bid to obtain the rank that is appropriate. Some keywords are simply much more valuable to you than others. It is an iterative process and the two most important factors are 1) how much traffic your campaign receives and 2) how much time I have to work on it. Some of my clients have made a serious mistake by not allowing me to perform the fine-tuning process once the new campaign is launched or they underestimate the amount of work required to perform this important task.

Before we begin the transition, I recommend that you implement Google Analytics. It offers data you won’t see in AdWords, such as bounce rate, number of pages per visit, % new visitors and average time on site. These are all valuable pieces of data that help us establish relative values for specific keywords, ad copy and web pages. In addition, you can set up “goals”, which are like conversions. But unlike the AdWords 30-day cookie, the Google Analytics cookie can last up to two years! This can help give us a more accurate cost/conv.

So let’s review why you might want to incur the additional expense of redesigning your AdWords account and seemingly subject yourself to the risk.

The characteristics I describe in the broad match effect, implies you don’t have the desired control over what’s going on in your AdWords account. You aren’t able to control what ad a user sees for any given search query, your ads are being shown for irrelevant searches (unwanted impressions), you are paying for a lot of poor quality visitors and you are spending a lot of time making changes to your account without any real confidence you know what you are doing. You’re doing stuff like; ad copy changes, new keywords, experimenting with keyword matching options, adding a lot of negative keywords and changing bid prices. Probably not the best use of your time.

The answer is, you will get:

Better search query to ad copy relevance

Higher CTR

Higher quality scores

Lower CPC

Lower cost/conv

Fewer unwanted impressions

Higher CTR

Lower CPC

Lower cost/conv

Fewer unwanted clicks

Lower ad spend

Lower cost/conv

Easier on-going account maintenance

Lower costs

Less of your time

Better ROI

The confidence in knowing what’s actually happening

Frees you up to focus on other things

The confidence in knowing you are in control

Freedom to try new things

A happier life 🙂

One final word of caution. You have probably come to the realization that the new account design I discussed is pretty involved. Well, you’re right. Therefore, if you or anyone else make changes to the new campaign, chances are they will do more harm than good. It would be like hiring someone to tune your baby grand piano and then making a few minor adjustments on your own! Not a good idea.

One of my favorite phrases when it comes to technology in general, but especially when it comes to the Google AdWords quality score is “The more you know, the more you don’t know”. Quality score is a black hole that never ends and keeps changing.

To gain an appreciation for quality score, I recommend that that you begin by viewing two brief, but very informative YouTube videos. The first one covers the basic concept and the other is titled Introduction to the Google Ad Auction. They are both very well done.

Depending on your level of interest, I have compiled a list of additional resources, which I think you will find informative. They include targeted sections from the AdWords Help Center, as well as some outside resources I’ve compiled.

As it relates specifically to customized landing pages, here are a few best practices:

Have the keyword in the landing page URL.

Keyword rich meta tags for:

Title tag

Description tag

Keyword tag

Image alt tags

Strive for a keyword density of 2-3%, but don’t sacrifice salesmanship in the process

Avoid

Pop-ups

Opt-in forms

Auto-play audio

Make sure the landing page loads quickly (load time). I don’t recommend using a blog as a landing page because it takes too long to load and may have a lot of external links that lead the visitor away.

Generate incoming links to your site with the keyword phrase in the anchor text. This isn’t absolutely required, but will help in competitive markets. Some ideas for getting a few incoming links quickly are submitting articles with your link in the resource box, post comments on blogs in your market, and link from your other sites.

If you have several landing pages which have a lot of duplicate content, don’t put them on your navigational structure, place them in a sub-directory. If you are concerned about the possibility of duplicate content from an SEO perspective, use an appropriate “no index” script.

Make sure there is no code on the page that prevents the Google bot (AdsBot-Google) from spidering the page

Prominent links to

Privacy policy

Terms of use

Any disclaimer

Contact us and include:

Company business name

Street address

Phone number

A real person’s name is also helpful

An escape to the main body of the website

Make sure Google is interpreting the site as the intended category, (the correct site genre). Check this with the Google external keyword tool and type in your website, then note the categories on the left side.

Get a couple quality inbound links to the site that are from related types of categories and make sure the hyper-text is the keyword you are optimizing for.

Have a couple of outbound links to authority sites with a page rank of at least 4. Websites with a .org tend to be good because they tend to be authority sites, but not competitive.

Create a blog in a separate directory on your website with a link to the blog on every page. Continually update the blog with fresh, relevant content. However, do not use the blog as a landing page because there may be too many outbound links.

Now, here is a real pearl of wisdom that trumps almost everything I’ve said. I have found that the overriding factor in a keyword quality score is “how that keyword has performed throughout the Google system”. This is a direct quote from Google, which they understate.

Therefore, if you have a relatively short, broad keyword such as “divorce attorney”, it is going to be very difficult to have a decent quality score. By decent I mean 7 or higher. In fact, it will be nearly impossible. The implementation of the quality score metric is Google’s way of not only insuring relevance for the user, but it’s a profit dial for Google because they can control how much an advertiser must pay to compete by simply manipulating the quality score algorithm.

If you plan to promote your website using Google AdWords you need to be mindful of how Google is evolving their policies because it can have a significant impact on your ROI. By ROI I mean what you pay Google in click charges verses what you get back in the way of business.

I created this post with the intention of educating you, the business owner. I realize that at some point in reading this, it will be beyond your technical knowledge. The rest of it, the stuff that is over your head, is for your web developer. I suggest you consider making this part of the statement of work (SOW) between you and your web developer.

Gone are the days of long-tail keywords, one-page sales letters, squeeze pages, vanity URLs and those black hat SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques. These changes are already having a significant impact on the Information Marketing and Affiliate Marketing industries. Google is rapidly evolving their quality score algorithm to be more SEO like. SEO is the way you get your website found through organic or natural search.

There are two things to be aware of.

If you or your web developer uses any black hat techniques for the purposes of SEO, Google could blacklist your site, your company and possibly even YOU, from appearing on Google ever again. Your entire business or any business you create in the future could be affected. Whatever short-term gains you might get are not worth the long-term penalties you might be subject to. Besides, you would only be prolonging the inevitable anyway.

Google has been quietly rolling out their new policies over the past couple of years. But every so often, they stop simply suggesting and start enforcing. Those of us in the business call it a Google slap! When that happens, some people have a very rude awakening and their online business takes a nosedive.

If you want to achieve the best possible ROI from your AdWords campaign, then there are certain things you need to do as a business owner and certain things your web developer needs to keep in mind as they create and maintain your website.

As a business owner, you need to specify the overall architecture, feature and function of your website. Web developers need to make sure the site is designed, developed and implemented to Google’s specifications, for the purpose of optimizing for AdWords.

When it comes to having the best possible ROI using AdWords, it’s all about relevance. Relevance means having tightly themed ad groups with highly relevant ad copy, with relevant landing page copy that is consistent with the rest of your website.

One of the major factors in determining what you pay per click and your ads ranking in the search results is known as landing page quality score. Most of these factors have to do with what you actually say on the landing page, how transparent you are and how easy it is to navigate your website. Rarely should you be sending prospects from a PPC campaign to your website home page, but sometimes it is appropriate.

Some of the aspects of landing page quality, as well as the overall website design, will be handled by the web developer. This usually depends on how knowledgeable you are about website design and the actual Google policies. In any case, you should make your web developer aware of Google’s webmaster guidelines so there will be no misunderstandings.

Now that you have an idea for the dos and don’ts, let’s come at this from a different angle so we increase the chances of maximizing your ROI. As a business owner, it is your responsibility to insure that your website is not what’s holding you back when it comes to getting the most from your AdWords campaign, and in fact, is what sets you apart from your competition.

Don’t expect your web developer to be your chief marketing strategist. They are typically graphic artists and technical geeks, not marketers. Most websites I see for small to medium-sized businesses are little more than online brochures. However, in fairness to their web developer, that’s probably exactly what the business owner asked for. I myself am a combination career marketing professional and part technical geek, but not a web developer. Just what you might expect for someone who does what I do.

Remember what I said earlier about relevance? Well, let’s peel back the onion a bit and see what that really means. Ideally, Google would like a user (your prospect) to perform a search using a query phrase that describes what it is they are looking for. They would see your ad with the actual query phrase they used in the headline of your ad. They would click on your ad because it was the clearest and most compelling ad on the page, and they were deposited at your landing page. The landing page would be all about the thing they were searching for and the rest of your website would have lots of relevant information about the topic they were interested in. And because your website was so great and packed with all kinds of relevant stuff, they would never have a need to search for that thing ever again. That is what Google would call the perfect user experience! I also discuss the topic of relevance in my post titled A chain of success.

Now let’s get specific. What are the things you need to do to insure your visitor has the best user experience, you maximize your landing page quality score and you still have a website that sells! Here are some suggestions:

The website development application. I’m getting a little out of my league here, but hopefully this will make sense. If you are like many of my clients, small business owners who want the ability to create and update content on your site without having to call your webmaster or learn a website development tool like Dreamweaver or FrontPage, then I suggest you work with a developer who will build your website with this in mind. Content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress could be just the ticket. FLASH sites are old news and will not work well with AdWords because the AdWords bot cannot interpret FLASH code.

Have a clear navigation structure. It’s OK to have pages that are off the navigation structure as long as the navigation structure is on every page and you don’t lead visitors down a dead-end path.

Landing pages specifically designed for each product or line of products if appropriate. Have the primary keyword as part of the “h1” tag on every product page. Have enough content on the landing page to reinforce the relevance to your ad and have a 2-3% keyword density for that keyword.

Make sure your meta tags conform to Google’s best practices; tags for <title>, <description> and <keyword>. There are format and length specification to be aware of. Here is a link to a nice little tutorial on the importance of meta tags.

Make sure all your images have what are called “alt tags”. This allows the search engine spiders to know what the image is. If you can describe the image in a way that is relevant to your topic, it helps your quality score.

Many successful online marketers will tell you that their most important asset is a quality email list for clients and prospects, which he/she has cultivated a good relationship with. There are several techniques you can use to build your list, but for the purpose of website development I recommend you have several “give-to-gets” and you capture visitor information using a good autoresponder like www.1shoppingcart.com or www.aweber.com.

If you do implement an autoresponder or any other form that collects personal information, it is essential that you also provide a privacy policy that discloses how the information will be used and that you give options to limit the use of a user’s personal information, such as the ability to opt out of receiving regular emails.

Become an expert on the topic your product or service is about. Have articles, preferably ones you created and published, product reviews and opinions. The more relevant content the better and it must be unique. Make sure it has a human voice to it and that you use the keywords you want to optimize for repeatedly throughout the document and don’t simply copy something from another website, Google will know and discount your quality score.

Whenever possible, avoid FLASH. Here are two reasons, 1) search engines spiders (the little programs that read your website and decide how good it is) can’t understand FLASH, it looks like a big blob to them. 2) FLASH does not SELL, it distracts the visitor! It’s wizzy and cool and web developers love to do stuff in FLASH, but it distracts the visitor from that one thing that is the entire purpose of your website. Get the visitor to do what you want them to do. Fill out a form, download a whitepaper, call you on the phone or how about this, buy something! With that said, FLASH does have its place when it comes to instructional or entertainment applications.

Have a blog. One of the best things you can do to improve your quality score is to have fresh, unique, relevant content. That’s exactly what having a blog will do.

If you sell something on the site, have a page which clearly states your terms.

Have an About Us page. Let visitors know there is a real person at the other end of the internet. Have a real physical address, a real person’s name and a phone number with a real person on the other end that is helpful in ways other than simply qualifying leads.

Google is bringing more and more of the organic search criteria into the pay-per-click (AdWords) side of their business. Years ago, ranking was all about what was on your web pages; proper use of meta tags, keyword density and other “on-page” characteristics. Today, page ranking is 80% “off-page” and only 20% on-page. Off-page means, who is linking to your site and how highly their site is ranked. If their site is ranked higher than your site, it pulls you up in the ranking and increases your quality score. If you think about it, it’s just like relationships in the real world. If you know popular and influential people then you become more popular and influential yourself.Whether you need to consider the time and expense of creating quality in-bound links will be determined by your current keyword and landing page quality scores. In many cases, the quality scores will be heavily influenced by the amount of competition for that keyword. If the keyword is relatively unique and has relatively little search volume, chances are you will not need to invest in in-bound links. On the other hand, if the keyword is quite broad and there is a lot of competition, having lots of high-quality in-bound links is one way you can increase your quality score and differentiate yourself from the competition.

In a perfect world, the words you use to describe your product or service would be exactly how people search for it online and your website would use those same words and phrases. Unfortunately, that doesn’t usually happen. Website developers and traditional media advertisers who have experience developing advertising copy; brochures, articles, advertisements, believe they can use the same vocabulary that worked for traditional media when they build web pages for visitors from search engines. But that can be a costly mistake!

Achieving a truly optimized search engine advertising campaign goes beyond the elements of your PPC campaign, such as keywords, bid prices, ad copy, etc. It also includes how you design your website, the use of custom landing pages, the words you use on your landing pages and the rest of your website.

Many advertisers, including myself, at one time designed their website from the inside-out. In other words, how they see themselves in the market or how they see the market niche they are in. Instead of from the outside-in, meaning how visitors from search engines think and what they actually search for. The inside-out approach may work fine for prospects from other channels or existing customers. However, visitors from search engines are a unique kind of prospect. They may be somewhat naive about the topic they are interested in. They can also become overwhelmed or confused by the variety of content for what they thought was a very specific topic. They can also be quite cynical and usually have very little patience.

The way you have designed your website may make perfect sense to you, your existing customers and even industry pundants. However, if it doesn’t relate well to how prospects from search engines actually search for what you offer, what I call the search vocabulary of your market, then your campaign will be far from optimal.

There are two important reasons why you need to be aware of this. The first has to do with what prospects are thinking when they use a search engine. The second has to do with how the Google AdWords game is played. Let’s take a closer look at each of these.

If you haven’t already done so, this would be a good time to pause and read my article titled A chain of success and the subsequent linked articles.

If the way you describe your product or service and the keywords you use to build your campaign, do not match how prospects search for what you offer, you will not only limit your exposure to real prospects, but if they do manage to reach your landing page and you do not use their search vocabulary, you will have created what we call friction. It would be as if you were having a conversation with someone with a very heavy foreign accent. For example, you may advertise yourself as a psychotherapist or a psychiatrist. However, when real people with real problems search online, they are more likely to use words like therapy, counseling or help. If you don’t take this into consideration when building your campaign, you will be missing out on the biggest segment of your target market. If your landing page does not quickly and efficiently alter their thought process and bring them around to your way of thinking, you will have missed the opportunity to engage with a legitimate prospect. When a visitor from a search engine lands on your website for the first time, you have 3-5 seconds to make a connection. If you don’t, they will bounce!

When you think of using PPC advertising, whether it’s Google AdWords or Bing™Ads, you must understand that there are rules that manifest themselves in the form of a quality score. These quality scores are a way of incentivizing or punishing you for being relevant or speaking the same language as the search engine user and the search engine’s robot. If your keyword, ad copy, landing page and website do not speak the same language as your visitor, you will not only pay a hefty penalty in the form of a higher CPC, but your ad may not display for a significant number of real prospects!

If you think about the process I discuss in the A chain of success, article it is possible to pull the prospect around to your way of thinking and not break the chain, but you need to be very careful. Keywords and keyword matching options, especially negative keywords will insure that your ad only displays for the right suspects. Proper ad copy can perform a valuable translation and qualifying function. Custom landing pages, if designed properly, will keep a qualified prospect engaged long enough for you to pull them into your sales process.

When you have the benefit of historical data in your AdWords and Analytics accounts, you are on your way to learning what I call the search vocabulary of your market. On the other hand, if you are just beginning your online advertising experience and you have built your website with little or no knowledge of your market’s search vocabulary, you are at a distinct disadvantage. It means you will essentially have to buy this knowledge. By this I mean you will have to learn it over time, at some expense by buying clicks in order to capture the data. There is no keyword tool in existence that can compare with a rich search term history from your own website, AdWords or Analytics account.

Where you stand in relation to the processes I’ve discussed will determine where you are along the path to having a truly optimized PPC campaign.

Having a successful PPC campaign means we have to get a lot of things right. We have to make sure we understand and address all the steps in the buying cycle and don’t leave anything to chance or the ROI will suffer. After all, online marketing is really salesmanship in print.

Most advertisers I come in contact with struggle, knowingly or unknowingly with one important principle of advertising, understanding and empathizing with prospects from search engines. Visitors from search, organic or PPC, are different from other visitors and your website must take this into account if you are going to have a successful PPC campaign.

Visitors from search are cynical, skeptical and have very little patience. From the moment they arrive on your landing page, you have three to five seconds to make a connection. If you don’t, they will leave and probably will not come back.

When we meet someone in person we can size up the situation by looking for body signals, listening to conversation, appearance, etc. But with online advertising, we have to rely on technology and copy (ad text, website text, graphics, etc.). I like to think of the process as a chain, and this chain is only as strong as its weakest link. If any link breaks, we lose the prospect and the resources we spent getting them to this point are wasted.

Here is how I describe the chain and the links within the chain:

What the prospect is thinking

What they actually type, i.e. the search query

The linkage between the search query and the advertiser’s keyword (matching options)

The actual keyword

The ad copy; headline, description and display URL

Your landing page priorities:

Capturing the visitor attention

Generating interest

Creating desire

Taking action

Conversion tracking

Your follow up mechanism

Making adjustments to improve the process or “making the chain stronger”

Ideally, everything is tied together into one continuous thought. If it isn’t, if you have left out a step or taken too big a leap in the process or failed to anticipate what they are thinking, you will lose them.

A common mistake AdWords advertisers make is not focusing on relevance. They build campaigns, ad groups, ads and use keywords that are only somewhat related to what it is they are offering in hopes of attracting a wider audience. When that happens, they usually fail at using AdWords as a viable channel for their business.

The trap that we as advertisers often fall into is knowing too much about our own business and not enough about our prospect or our competition. The choices our prospects have besides our own view of the problem they are trying to solve. We focus too much on things like features and not enough on benefits. For example, we see a keyword or query phrase and don’t realize how broad the term is.

Have you taken the time to do competitive research? Have you tried searching the major search engines using your most popular search queries? Have you studied your competitor’s landing pages, user experience, offers, calls-to-action? Have you opted-into their offer to see how they market to you? If you haven’t, then you have a ways to go before your AdWords account is optimized.

Keyword selection and keyword matching options is perhaps the single biggest issue I see when I first look at a client’s account. This is especially true when it comes to clients who offer a service. Here is a test you can do yourself. Take some of your most popular keywords and perform a Google search to see who else is bidding for those same keywords. If they aren’t selling exactly what you are, then there is a good chance your keyword is too broad.

The other problem has to do with using and understanding how powerful and yet dangerous broad-matched keywords can be when Google experiments with synonyms.

Another way of viewing the successful AdWords model is to look at it through the lense of probability. A successful AdWords campaign is really a collection of proven, high-probability models. What is the probability that someone searching using this search query, who sees this ad and goes to this landing page, will take the desired action. Our objective is to build a campaign that gives us the most number of high-probability models. This means that there will likely be some search queries that resulted in a conversion, but you simply can’t afford to focus on that query because you can’t make the numbers work. It’s simply a matter of economics.

Think of your landing page as your “elevator pitch”. Once the prospect arrives at your landing page, or enters the elevator, you better be prepared to give it your best shot because it may be your last!